Inside Out
by Sintari
Summary: Some things endure through ash and fire. NejiHinata.


_Title: Inside Out  
Author: Sintari  
Rating: MA/NC-17 (though just barely)  
Summary: Some things endure through ash and fire. Neji/Hinata. Lemon.  
Warnings: None really, except that this is not my usual Neji._

_Dedicated to Mizura AKA Random Person._

**_Note to readers on this site: This story has been altered slightly from its original form to comply with the guidelines of this site. If you want the uncensored version, please visit my profile for a link. _**

For shinobi on foot, the journey to the coast of the River Country would take merely half a day. Because an entourage was expected with these kinds of delegations, they'd be on the road for two days, maybe three. Hinata was expected to ride in the carriage, of course. Her Auntie Endoh watched her like a hawk, looking for any traces that she was mussing one of the formal kimono she traveled in. Every time Hinata looked out the window for too long, she would feel Endoh's nervous fingers plucking at the silk. Her future husband would never even see this kimono, but protocol reigned supreme in these situations. If they were to come across another traveling party, Hinata must present the very picture of a dutiful bride-to-be. Besides, she was a shinobi no longer and needed to grow accustomed to living like a Lady now.

Neji traveled with them as her father's proxy. Nevertheless, he refused to ride in the carriage but instead ranged ahead, watching for traps or ambushes. They couldn't have her kidnapped again, of course. Especially since she was now a much more valuable diplomatic pawn than she had been at age three. She'd seen Neji twice, during their day of traveling, but only with her Byakugan, and he was always very far away from the main party.

He was an hour ahead by the time they stopped and pitched the tents for the night and it was already full dark by the time he showed himself at the camp. They'd built one large bonfire and pitched the tents around it, sacrificing any hope of secrecy in favor of added security.

She was warming her hands when he appeared across the fire from her, his long hair still swaying from his leap down from the trees. Smoke made his face a haze, and he regarded her a long level moment across the flames. Without thinking she stood up and began to pace, for once uncaring that in a camp filled with all-seeing eyes, she couldn't stop staring at her cousin framed in ash and fire. Auntie Endoh caught her attention, clucking for her to gather the kimono up or she'd muddy the hem and when Hinata looked back up her cousin was gone.

She slept that night in the big main tent between Endoh and a female servant. In the early hours of the morning she imagined she saw a familiar shadow cross between her tent and the fire. Hinata lay very still for a long time after, thinking of excuses she would never use to step over the sturdy servant and leave the tent. The next day both her attendants had dark circles under their eyes, but whether it was from their unfamiliarity with tent-sleeping or the fact that her restlessness had kept them up all night, Hinata would never ask.

The landscape changed almost immediately after they crossed the borders into the River Country. Free from Konoha's man-made forest, bogs predominated. Had they been anyone but Hyuga a low-lying mist would have impeded their vision. The humidity was such that the damp plastered Hinata's hair to her face, even inside the carriage with the windows pulled shut. That afternoon a rainstorm held the party up, leaving them all cold and sticky, like the moment after a fever breaks. Tempers ran short in the small compartment and Hinata was relieved when they finally gave up and made an early camp.

She hadn't seen Neji all day, and with the rain she didn't even have an excuse to linger outside by the sputtering fire.

In the main tent, Auntie Endoh fed her hot soup, which Hinata knew had no practical value in preventing a cold but allowed anyway.

There's no good way to knock on a tent, so Neji merely loomed in the doorway until Endoh instructed the servant to part the flap. Hinata observed that he was soaking wet and appeared to notice it not at all.

"Hinata-sama. A word."

Endoh pursed her lips but knew better than to order the heir to her bed.

"You should change out of your third-best kimono if you're going to stand about in the rain," was what she said instead.

Hinata had less than a day before she entered into a binding marriage contract before Heaven and Earth. They could remedy the water damage to the silk later.

He led her out of the circle of firelight, then beyond the tents, then beyond the range of the Byakugan. They didn't touch, she merely followed. He slowed his pace enough to allow her to pick her steps. She imagined a coquette would stumble now, and allow him to catch her. But she wasn't a coquette and if they did this – this thing they had been promising with smoking looks across crowded rooms for far too long – then they were going to do it honestly, under no false pretenses.

They were on the outskirts of a bog, though Neji seemed to know the way. Mud sucked at Hinata's impractical slippers and she sank up the ankles once. Which was all it took. Neji turned around and, spotting her fishing for her slipper, simply picked her up by the waist and pressed her against the pale bark of a spindly tree, leaving only one shoe dangling off her toes.

His skin was chill-bumped from the cold, but when he pulled her to his chest Hinata swore she saw steam rising off his bared arms. She scraped fingernails under wet tendrils of hair that clung to his neck, found a handhold on his jutting collarbones. His eyes were level with her nose in this position, but with his face so close to hers she still felt small and vulnerable.

"Is this really what you want?" he asked in that voice that pinned her heart to her spine. Even then he kept his face carefully blank. It was the expression of someone who waited to hear the word no, even now, with her trembling against him in the dark.

"Yes." The word didn't sound as sure as she'd meant it to, but it was desire that clogged her throat and softened her voice.

He touched her all over then. Her face, her neck, her collarbone, her breasts. His hands stroked down her flanks, palmed the flat of her stomach, cupped her buttocks, then the backs of her thighs as he found an even tighter grip on her, pinned her to the tree with his weight. He forged a fire-trail of kisses down her neck and only then could she hear over the roaring in her ears that he was saying _mine, mine, mine. _

Her stomach had never felt that way before, helixes of heat like snakes coiling. It was like what being poisoned should feel like, except that Hinata gladly would have died from this. Their bodies pressed far too close together, until there was no air, no space, no Branch House, no Main House between them. She was slick and so was he and she didn't notice him manipulate the ties on his pants with one hand so that when he took her virginity with one quick movement, like the efficient removal of a bandage, she wasn't wholly expecting it.

That first night it was Neji who cried out. Hinata hushed him with her mouth. It was their first kiss. Maybe they did things in the wrong order, the two of them. But so much between them had always been upside down and inside out that she couldn't imagine doing this any differently. When she fantasized about this night, she never changed a thing from the mud on her toes to Neji's cold lips.

For years after, when the wind unexpectedly carried the smell of peat moss and loam to her nostrils, curls of desire would twist Hinata in knots until guilt made her pick up one of the children or go help out in the kitchens. Even then, she would be so distracted she wouldn't notice the baby still crying on her shoulder, or a streamer of blood from a knife-cut running down her finger and into her husband's dinner.

Hinata had a summer wedding. She could feel her cousin's eyes on her during the entire ceremony and when she went to take her groom's hand to complete the ritual she saw that her own were shaking.

Neji came through the receiving line. She busied herself hugging Endoh but all the same saw Neji take her new husband's hand and clasp it in both of his own. When he got to her he bent down and whispered in a husky voice, "Will you think of me when you're with him?"

But he was gone before she could say yes. Always yes.

She obeyed her wedding vow for a long year, but then Hiashi died and she was head of Hyuga and desire made her careless.

She made up a lie about delivering a message to Neji's room and he took her fully-clothed on the floor while a Byakugan-less servant knocked futilely on the door.

She took walks in the gardens in the middle of the night and he would appear like magic out of the hedges, covering her mouth as he took her from behind so that her cries wouldn't wake the household.

When her belly swelled with her first child he held her for a long time, rubbing her stomach proprietarily before saying what they both thought.

"It could be mine."

"I hope it's yours," she said. "Ours."

But the round faced little boy looked so much like her dim, good-natured husband that Hinata cried all through his naming ceremony and blamed it on nerves.

She used the excuse of nursing to sleep in a private room. As her Captain, Neji would report to her every night. The urgency of their meetings hadn't diminished with the coming of the baby, and she couldn't bring herself to feel guilty when they would lie together while her son slept on in his crib.

"Does he do this to you?" Neji would ask, then trace the shell of her ear with his tongue.

"He doesn't," she would say breathlessly.

"Does he do this?" His touch burning her skin like venom, intense eyes pinning her to the bed.

"N-No."

Later, with her on top, her palms splayed on his chest, his hands roving over her.

"Does he make you scream?"

Her stomach would clench, that old familiar feeling. "No, no, never."

"And does he make you…?"

"No," she would scream. "No, no, no." And it meant yes, it meant harder, it meant again, more, never stop.

They knew it couldn't last.

As it turned out, Auntie Endoh, with her weak Byakugan saw something more in Hinata's husband than his dim good-nature.

Thinking that she would spare him, Endoh set it up so that Hinata's husband would not catch them in the act itself, but in the aftermath.

"Who do you love?" Hinata's husband was crouched with Endoh in the hedges when Neji asked it.

"You," she'd answered. "Only you."

Seconds later, as Endoh shouted at them, Hinata watched her husband run his hand through his thinning hair over and over again. They hadn't sprung apart when they got caught; instead Neji pulled her to him. And his smile at her husband's distress was all sharp-edged cruelty.

Hinata twisted out of his grip. She hadn't forgotten that much of her shinobi life.

"I-I'm sorry," she told her husband. And the stutter from her old life was back, too.

She crossed the few short steps to her husband, bowed her head and asked his forgiveness there in front of Endoh, in front of Neji. For once she wasn't watching, so she didn't see the expression on Neji's face when he finally heard that "no" he'd been expecting all these years.

Hinata and her husband agreed that it would no longer be appropriate for Neji to keep his post as her Captain. They agreed that they had a dynasty to manage, the two of them, complete with three children, a large extended family and numerous holdings, and that if word of this affair got out, it would undermine all that they stood for.

Silently, they agreed that clinging to a first love was foolish. That an affair like Neji's and Hinata's couldn't stand up to the cold light of day. That, in the end, Hinata would be Main House – noble – and Neji would be Branch House – unworthy – and no matter how far they ran away from the Five Countries they would never be able to bridge that gap.

Now whenever she saw her cousin, it was in the company of her husband and the elephant in the room. She stopped walking in the garden. He couldn't get near enough to whisper in her ear. She still felt the curls of desire when she glimpsed him, but as he took more and more missions for Konoha those glimpses came fewer and farther between.

She had hurt Neji irreparably.

They grew old that way. The children grew up and entered loveless dynastic marriages of their own. Hinata took to gardening in all her spare time. Neji retired from the ANBU as a decorated Captain. Hinata's husband died after a lingering summer illness no one could diagnose.

Not long after, Neji sickened. An ancient lung injury had began to pain him in his old age, and when Hinata looked through him with her Byakugan she could see the scar tissue gnarling his left lung in sharp contrast to Neji's outward appearance. As he had been when he was young, he was still an upright, graceful old man.

When he walks with her in the garden now they stop frequently so he can catch his breath. They're much too old for hot trysts among the hedges of course, but she thinks of them and so does he.

"It was wrong of me to take you from your husband," he says out of the blue one day.

"You didn't take me," she says peaceably. "I followed you."

"It was my duty to protect you." The low wheeze accompanying his words worries Hinata, but she doesn't suggest he sit down. Not yet.

"I knew where I was going," she says instead, and takes his hand in a companionable gesture.

He decides to sit on his own then, and pulls her along with him so that she's standing in front of him as he's seated on the marble bench. She suddenly has the urge to slip off her sandals and feel the mud on her toes.

He's floating away from her, she realizes. As ephemeral as smoke from a late-night bonfire, as fleeting as chill-bumps on bare skin.

"Really," he says, his voice as urgent as she's ever heard it. "I was wrong."

But in her mind he's saying, "Who do you love?" and her insides have turned to water just like all those years ago. This time though, she'll say, "You, only you," and when Endoh betrays them she won't apologize. She'll run away with him, thousand year old name be damned. So when he says, a little breathlessly from the marble bench, "You were all I ever wanted," she can reach down and stroke his cheek with the backs of her knuckles and admit, "If I had it to do all over again, I would have chosen you."

But the two of them, they've always done things upside down and inside out.


End file.
